Cost of Production Network

NOTICE: Due to social distancing measures with COVID-19, the Canadian Cost of Production Network is delaying focus groups until January 2021. If you sign up here, you will be contacted by a provincial coordinator in the fall to schedule. Select province will be running pilots in the fall.

Canfax Research Services (CRS) is proud to present the Canadian Cow-Calf Cost of Production Network (CDN COP Network) funded by the Beef Cattle Research Council (BCRC) and delivered with our provincial partners. The CDN COP Network will consists of hosting 26 producer focus groups (consisting of 5-6 producers in each) across Canada in 2020/21 in different eco-regions using various production systems.

The objective is to develop baseline cost of production statistics in a way that minimizes the response burden on producers. Annual indexing means that producer data is collected every five years.

Scenarios will be developed of what future farms could look like utilizing the 5% Rule approach of evaluating where incremental improvements could be made around productivity, input costs and output prices. This would be mindful of the fact that different farms have different limitations to land, labour and capital.

Producers within the focus groups will be encouraged to network in achieving the future farm results over the coming 3-5 years; supporting industry competitiveness and an attitude of continuous improvement that seeks out new innovations and management practices.

How to Participate?

There will be sessions in every province from British Columbia to Prince Edward Island. Producers from Alberta can contact the Beef specialist at AgriProfit$, as the AgriProfit$ program is feeding into the CDN COP Network. For all other provinces, if you are interested in participating:

1. Fill in the Sign-up Survey. These questions allow us to group 5-6 producers who operate in similar environments and have similar production systems.

2. Come ready to share. This document [coming soon] provides a summary of the type of information that will be asked.

3. Come ready to learn. The focus group allows producers the opportunity to learn from each other.

Participating producers will receive a $500 honorarium at the focus group session. All individual results will be confidential and remain anonymous.

What you get

Participating producers will get:

Farm summary of production system including production indicators

Summary of Baseline cow-calf enterprise data; with five years of historical indexing

Summary of Future Farm scenarios

How will this be used?

The CDN COP Network will provide:

Baseline data for 26 different types of cow-calf operations across Canada to benchmark from

Future Farm scenarios for each of these baseline farms to identify opportunities

Collaborative research projects are being built to find:

win-win solutions that both reduce cow-calf greenhouse gas emissions and make economic sense.